Capitals matter in Google?!?

[Corey]

Is it just me, or is this surprising to you as well?

http://www.thejunglemap.com/post/229

[Jason Dockery]

Very surprising!  Now to rewrite hundreds of webpages. :)

Jason

[glaikit]

I'm not panicking on this one :-)

There may be two things going on.
One, it is possible that Google 'recognizes' proper names and when a
search on a name is capitalized, you get slightly different results.
Maybe that the Caps cause a narrower search than small case.

Two, I noticed a few months ago that when comparing SERPs between
Google and Yahoo, Google definitely leans more towards an exact match,
Yahoo seems to care less and is more flexible in the SERPs it dishes
up.
Another good test might be to compare results on Google using a word
or phrase that are "not normally" capitalized and see if there's a
difference.

They can't possibly be thinking of actually narrowing or altering
their results depending on Caps - I would think it would be a
disservice to the users out there!

Fiona

[Corey]

It's definitely happening for other keywords, not just proper names.

So far, it looks like the changes are very minor. But they are
changed.

Corey